


Heart Weather

by kalliel



Series: 尸魂界のために [2]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Exhaustion, Gen, Gotei 13 | 13 Court Guard Squads - Freeform, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Major Illness, Nakama, Post-Thousand Year Blood War Arc, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Protectiveness, Soul Society is honestly not a great place, bad geoengineering, but maybe it can be someday, how to bury 2000 bodies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:53:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28201182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalliel/pseuds/kalliel
Summary: Living to see the end of a war is not the same as surviving it. In the wake of the Thousand-Year Blood War, the cosmic fabric of Soul Society has been fundamentally altered--and when Hitsugaya gets put in charge of managing the weather, it seems the prognosis can only get worse. Meanwhile, the consequences of his battle with Gerard are starting to catch up with him; and as the body count ticks up ever higher, the tolls of war are going to catch up to everyone.No body can contain all this grief.
Relationships: Hinamori Momo & Hitsugaya Toushirou, Hitsugaya Toushirou & Matsumoto Rangiku
Series: 尸魂界のために [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2065899
Comments: 5
Kudos: 25





	1. heart // weather

**Author's Note:**

> お誕生日おめでとう日番谷冬獅郎! <3 Happy birthday, Hitsugaya. I can't believe I've known you for 13 years?!

It's just another summer storm. Hot and juicy, like one of Hinamori's tomatoes. There hasn't been a storm like this since before the war, though. It's so warm. Summer _summer!_ screeches someone not-a-child, though their delight is youthful.

Beyond the walls of Seireitei, there are still glaciers, melting. The fields are a shallow sea.

It has been 37 days. It has been a lifetime.

—

Day 3, or maybe 4. There are more that need burying than can bury.

On top of that, Hitsugaya has been dismissing people handful by handful, like sand from between fingers—to check for family, to account for survivors, or simply to be elsewhere. To be anywhere but the edge of this long, deep grave. Matsumoto watches an unseated shinigami's mouth twist into a sob, a frown, and then a thin, impassive line when he tells her to find a meal, and then not to return for twelve hours. Non-negotiable.

She's uninjured, she can dig; she should be digging. That's what the girl's thinking, Matsumoto knows.

Matsumoto also knows Hitsugaya would like the girl to stay that way.

The girl—Hinode Mayuko, that's her name—leaves furious (lost, scared), desperate not to cry in front of her captain. Her eyes catch Matsumoto's, and she tries not to cry in front of her, either. Still, this is kindness.

There's only so many faces you can lay to rest before it does something to you. There is only so long you can stand above a grave, looking in. How many faces or how long you have, or even what it does, Matsumoto couldn't say for sure. But she stands at the precipice and watches Hitsugaya stare downward and feels the shovel rub at the blisters on her palms as she strikes the ground, and she has an inkling.

There are two hundred unaccounted for in the 10th. This pit, this grave they're digging, will need to serve at least that many. Matsumoto stares down through the cavernous darkness and tries to think only in terms of geometry. She tries not to think about faces.

—

The shinigami's proximity to death was part of the Quincy's distaste for them. It was inelegant, dirty, and so unlike their Quincy whites. And a thousand years ago, perhaps that distaste hadn't been entirely unearned—bloodlust and body counts had made a shinigami what it was, in the beginning.

"If only they knew how much ceremony we stand around on now," Hitsugaya had commented, lip curling as he'd explained this to her, leaning into the expository and pulling history seemingly from nowhere, as is his tendency. He probably knows more about the history of Soul Society than half of those that lived it.

In the years since the beginning, they'd managed to adopt more of the Quincy's standoffishness than the Quincy or even they had realized. Human taste filtered through Soul Society as it always has and always will, whether it concerns the philosophical and bodily nature of death, or the latest tasty 7-11 snacks. Maybe shinigami think they take pride in and vaunt their own cultures of death— _we're supposed to be the "gods" of it, after all,_ Hitsugaya notes—but they're not as in control as they think. Likely no one even realized it was happening, but: Death became dirty. That's why it's not an officer's job to bury the dead. To dig the graves by their own hands.

But they have a duty to these bodies. So Hitsugaya and Matsumoto dig.

Neither of them are well enough to actually recover the bodies, anyway. Kurotsuchi's ministrations are ongoing, and Matsumoto can honestly say she's never felt pain like this in her life—not in this chronic, from-inside way. It's like she can feel her bones split every time she plunges the shovel's nose into the ground, pulls up one more clod of dirt. They shatter into dust and sometimes they don't reform.

It's only inflammation, Kurotsuchi had tittered clinically, the last time they'd gone for treatment, but it had still taken him hours to spin her blood clean of Giselle's poison, and even then it had only been a stop-gap—a treatment of the symptom rather than the disease itself. He's still working on the cocktail that will purify them for good. In the meantime, the pills only leave Matsumoto exhausted.

Hitsugaya pulls his chain over his head and leans Hyourinmaru against the side of the pit, then sinks shakily to the ground. He's neither a skilled nor aggressive shoveler, and probably never would have been, whatever the circumstances. But he'd never stop, had he anything left to give. He looks skyward for a moment, at the thick expanse of gray clouds above, before his eyelids droop and he stares at the ground they have yet to move.

Matsumoto wills her bones to reform from ash.

—

Kyouraku—Captain Commander Kyouraku now, Matsumoto reminds herself—pays them a house call, early on. It is unusual to meet with the Captain Commander anywhere but the 1st, but he'd wanted to come personally, to inform them both that Ukitake would have a funeral. Not for some time, of course, given that there was much to be done, but—

"You'd like the body frozen," says Hitsugaya.

What an assumption to make. Something curdles in Matsumoto, and the prospect wrenches her breath from her. Ukitake is supposed to be mangling bonsai and quelling everyone's fears. He is not supposed to be a body.

Suddenly and fiercely, she wants to wrap her captain in her arms—in a way he wouldn't appreciate and that might not actually help him. It might've helped her, though, because Kyouraku's reply is worse.

"There is no body."

"Then what are you requesting?"

Kyouraku shrugs. "I make house calls," he says, as he eyes Hitsugaya up and down. He stays with the darkened hollows beneath his eyes and the distraction of pain behind them. "An old habit, I suppose."

His words are an outline of a body no longer there.

After the battle above the fake Karakura, Matsumoto had wondered if everything she did felt like Gin. Could everyone around her feel him in her, feel her mourning? Watching and hearing Kyouraku, she knows that it did.

Ukitake is in everything.

But he is not all things.

Kyouraku still has a favor to ask. "And Byakuya suggested it might be better to come to you than expect you to come to me." (He calls him "Byakuya," the way only Ukitake had.)

"Did he," says Hitsugaya.

(The day the war had ended, Kuchiki had been the one to deposit Hitsugaya at her feet. He'd carried him under his arm like a rice sack (though Matsumoto is fairly certain Kuchiki has carried more bodies than rice). Medical attention is likely in order, Kuchiki had suggested to her, before walking away without administering or sending for anything at all. He had not even explained what had happened.

 _You,_ Kurotsuchi had snarled at her captain when she and Hitsugaya had shown up at 12th, each mostly under their own power. _I perform miracles, and you spit in my face. What did you do?_ )

Kyouraku does not want _a_ body frozen.

It will take days—maybe weeks—to collect, account for, and bury the dead. By latest report, the toll is in the thousands. Many of the living are critically wounded. They can't help; and some won't make it. Kyouraku does not want the bodies to rot too quickly. But full summer is coming, and with it rain and heat. Neither mix well with the dead.

"Are you able?" Kyouraku asks.

Matsumoto didn't realize this was possible until Hitsugaya fails to object.

To Matsumoto, tensou juurin for the span of a battle, a battlefield, seems like one thing, and a storm in the skies over all of Soul Society, for days or weeks, quite another. But all Hitsugaya says is that he doesn't personally understand the meteorology. The long-term impacts, the consequences on the broader scale, the crop cycles. He wouldn't be able to control for any of that.

He finishes, "I'm reluctant."

Kyouraku gives him a patronizing smile, and Hitsugaya seems as shocked by this as she. Kyouraku has never treated him like a child before.

"Hitsugaya-taichou," he says. "It's been a thousand years since this place has seen a war such as this. Soul Society has never laid eyes on one. Allow me to explain."

As far as crop cycles are concerned, all the fields are burned or burning. Nanao is already in the process of arranging for the importation of shelf goods from the human realm. They will all be on war rations for some time. What's more, the Wandenreich had leveled mountains, forests, entire ecosystems, and the battles that had raged had not just tumbled buildings, or shed only blood. Soul Society, to its dew points, its atmosphere, the nature of reishi itself, had been fundamentally altered.

They'll be paying for this war for an epoch. The damage is already done.

"I didn't ask if you were willing. I asked if you were able," Kyouraku finishes.

Really, he isn't asking anything. He is Captain Commander.

"Thank you for the education," says Hitsugaya. Then, with all due respect or perhaps none at all, his eyes narrow and he says, "But what do you actually know about weather?"

"Taichou," Matsumoto objects, soft warning.

"You play with shadows, yet you never found the army the Wandenreich had built inside them. And you _still_ want to act like the consequences will limit themselves to what we understand?"

Kyouraku doesn't fight small wars. "We have two thousand bodies to bury," he replies.

—

It's winter again. It's June.

Hitsugaya picks up a shovel and tests the ground. It's harder to dig, but not completely frozen. As so ordered.

The cold makes Matsumoto's fingers ache and her joints keen. She digs until her fingers bleed and her wrists are so swollen she can't bend them.

The next morning, she wakes to incredible cold. It's not quite dawn. Outside, a layer of powder snow coats the ground, bright and luminous.

"Fuck." Hitsugaya, outside.

They lose a day of digging, waiting for the thaw.

—

Soul Society avoids both blizzards and heat waves. Beyond that, Hitsugaya hasn't made any promises.

All the birds have begun flying in circles.

"It's like they're all vultures now," Hisagi notes grimly. He's stopped by to say hello, on his way back to the 9th. He'd gone to pick up the pills for Kensei and had thought he could get Matsumoto hers as well, but Kurotsuchi had refused. Too many middle-men. He doesn't trust "you idiots."

Hisagi keeps looking at Matsumoto like he can't quite believe she's alive. His eyes are full of all of those he'd tried to find and couldn't.

"Not that I don't like vultures," he qualifies. "I mean, they're cleaners—they're really a lot like us, they could practically be our—like, on our crest, or—"

Matsumoto quirks her eyebrows and holds out her shovel. Automatically, he takes it and moves earth.

"You're so weird," she says. Everyone talks about how cool and severe Hisagi is but she's really not sure what she's missing here. Hisagi's just Hisagi.

"I didn't want to sound ungrateful," he says, without breaking the rhythm of his digging.

By current estimation, the only division with a higher casualty rate than 9th had been the 11th, and the 11th doesn't bury their dead. It's smelled like burning hair for days. For as many days, the 9th has been stacking bodies rolled in tatami, as tall as their remaining buildings. The bodies come and come. They're grateful for the frost.

Matsumoto twists a lock of hair round her fingers. It feels chalky with dried sweat. "Taichou said something about the birds, too. I don't think he'd disagree with you."

"Is he all right?"

"Why do you ask?"

Hisagi shrugs. "I just meant with the—" He stops digging momentarily to draw a swirling pattern with his finger, directed at the sky. "I don't really know how elemental zanpakutou work. I didn't realize it was possible to— When he told me where to find you, he just seemed—"

"You have your own dead to bury, Hisagi," says Hitsugaya, from behind her. Matsumoto shrieks.

Hisagi, sheepish, sets the shovel aside. "I wanted to return the favor."

For the shinigami Hitsugaya had sent to dig for 9th, he clarifies.

"It seemed like they'd find it easier to bury strangers," Hitsugaya acknowledges. Everyone does, probably, he adds, but he doesn't want Hisagi to miss something he'll regret. Even if it's not easy.

Hisagi nods.

Later that night, Matsumoto and Hitsugaya memorize the faces of the dead as they lower them into the ground. This will not be an unmarked grave, bodies tossed within like refuse. They will know exactly how each body rests.

"Put Ayaka-chan next to Odo," says Matsumoto. "She's his daughter-in-law."

"I hadn't realized they'd already married," says Hitsugaya. Ayaka's husband, Odo's son, is still unaccounted for. Maybe they should leave space, maybe they should hope they find him living. In any case, whatever the weather, the bodies won't keep indefinitely. They need to be buried.

"The wedding was going to be this summer."

"Oh," says Hitsugaya.

He rests Ayaka's head against cold earth, her skin green-white white against flat black. Her stomach is beginning to bloat. The sun has set and it's almost too dark to see his hands come away entangled in loose hair and sloughed skin.

"Almost" spares them nothing.

—

Nothing could have prepared Hitsugaya for this. That's what worries her. Not that anyone can really be prepared for a war toll of this scale—but in the 64th, Matsumoto had at least caught glimmers. She'd grown up deep enough into Rukongai that the village was hit by marauders from the wilder districts with some frequency. Massacres came weekly, and she'd hauled straw to her share of pyres, picked through the remains of torched buildings to locate the dead.

 _Rangiku-chan, this is a celebration,_ the village patriarch would tell her, of the flames. _The dead return to the human world to begin new life._

The patriarch generally didn't acknowledge her, but sometimes the nostalgia of ceremony would seize him, and he'd act the part. She'd be dirt again in the morning.

 _Then why are they crying?_ she asked, while she had him. She pointed to the mourners.

 _There's no rest in the human world,_ someone else jeered. _You wanna lay your head, you gotta die._

So, no different than the 64th. No one else had seemed to realize the trap.

Junrinan was different. That's what she'd grown up being told, in any case. In Junrinan, there were shoes, and schools, and only the unluckiest starved. The streets were still dirt and the nights were cold, but you could live a good life there. You didn't go thirsty because there was blood in the water.

Maybe Hitsugaya's distracted by the weather work. Maybe he's just tired. There are burials, there are the records of the dead, which grow longer, and longer, and longer. There are fingers that ache as they traffic between shovel and brush. There is anger, because it should never have been like this. There is nothing that could have prepared him, and it shows.

This isn't to say the 10th has never lost anyone before. In the last century, they've been somewhat infamous for losing captains—sometimes so quickly that Hitsugaya isn't even the least senior, in terms of years served. And as captain he's overseen his share of funerals.

But not like this.

Every day, Hitsugaya feels further away. He listens when she tells him about the 64th, but he doesn't hear her.

244 shinigami under his command are dead.

Two weeks ago they'd been forgetting reports and stealing from the mess hall and scrubbing hallways, forcing each other to the ground as they sparred and trying to imagine the day they might summon shikai. They'd been the ones putting souls to rest.

244 people under his care.

—

247.

—

He doesn't say anything about it. He doesn't really have to. 249 are dead, and thousands more beyond their rolls. 251.

253\. (They died with each other's swords in hand, and not their own. There's a story there, and none to tell it. There is no pointing wondering.)

254.

This is more than they'd accounted for. They will have to widen the trench.

—

Ichigo has been barred from Soul Society indefinitely ever since the battle ended—a banishment that, according to Yumichika according to Ikkaku, Urahara is playfully taking quite seriously. Officially, the request was submitted by the head of the Kuchiki clan, co-signed by the Captain Commander, and made law by the Council of 46. But the order is Rukia's.

For all that Ichigo has seen and done and weathered, he is seventeen years old, and he is human.

The war was enough. Rukia will not allow him to suffer its afterlives. He is human.

He is only seventeen years old.


	2. 凍死

Hitsugaya brings Kyouraku up more than once. Still, the summer stays winter.

—

Since waking from Kurotsuchi's vessel, Matsumoto has swallowed 255 pills to keep Giselle's poison at bay. Twelve pills attempting to neutralize the poison and the rest to manage the side effects. Her joints ache and her fingernails are turning brittle. The poison always comes blossoming back.

"Taichou?"

Hitsugaya has stopped fourteen pills into his latest cocktail. His breathing is carefully measured.

"Are you all right?"

He doesn't say yes. She catches the tremor as he picks up the next capsule, the way his fingers fumble.

He mutters, "It can't be helped," which is also what he'd eventually said of the dead. All of them, coming and coming. It's not an absolution; their blood is on his hands. It's just that this is the world. You suffer it.

_仕方がない._

Maybe Junrinan isn't different, after all.

—

They are at the 12th. Every three days they come, and they sit, and for four hours Kurotsuchi spins their blood clean, buying himself time for yet another miracle cure. Four hours is a long time to sit with only your thoughts. Hitsugaya seems willing.

"It's better than those strange capsules," Matsumoto supposes.

Hitsugaya says nothing. There's a limit to how many times he's willing to thank Kurotsuchi, and he's said his piece.

Matsumoto flips open her copy of the latest issue of _Seireitei Communications_. It's more of a leaflet than the usual magazine, a front page listing the confirmed dead. Page 2, the missing. Page 3, restoration and building bulletins, descriptions of work teams and taskforces seeking able-bodied volunteers. Any division. Page 4, ads from elderly relatives, trying to make contact with their missing. A few of the ads are young shinigami, asking after elderly relatives.

That's the worst page. It's been some time since the SC was the fastest way of getting touch with someone, and the practice feels like a relic—like an old talisman, fallen back on because it felt familiar in a world that was now unrecognizable. It felt desperate, because Matsumoto knew these people were only placing ads because quicker forms of communication had yielded no reunions. Most of them probably knew, even while writing their ad, paying their fee, that they weren't really asking after the living.

They were writing to the dead.

Page 5 is an inventory of the goods that will soon be arriving from the world of the living, and a description of the rationing and collection process. (The process is, "you will stand in a long line.") The rations are not exciting, but food in Soul Society rarely is: Rice with barley. Tuna, canned or dried. Pickled vegetables, miso. Hardtack, 15g of konpeito, and beer. ("Ooh!")

There is also a poll—with a fairly impressive sample size, given the givens. "Modern Craft Beers are Coming to Seireitei. Who Would You Trust with Your Recommendations?" Matsumoto reads aloud.

"Hisagi sounds like he has a lot of time on his hands." It's the first time Hitsugaya's spoken in over an hour. Matsumoto can't even tell if it had been a comfortable silence, or a wreckage.

"That's what I keep saying!" Matsumoto agrees, for the sake of staving off silence. But she also can't shake that look in Hisagi's eyes, the day he'd come to visit. The sheer desperation in them to see something alive and well. She knows why this article, why now.

"There's a Top Five. Who are your guesses?" she says.

She doesn't expect Hitsugaya to respond. But he says, "Sasakibe."

He meets her gaze when she turns to face him and adds, "Beer was introduced to Japan by the Dutch. That's British enough."

That Sasakibe is dead, he doesn't mention.

Kyouraku is first on the list, and Matsumoto a close second. Which is frankly an insult, because Kyouraku is a sake and spirits man. Whiskey, sure, but beer? That's her domain. Kuchiki is third, which might have seemed odd. However, with rare exception, history had indeed borne out that good taste was a Kuchiki birthright, no matter how far-flung the subject. Then Iba, fourth. And fifth—Hitsugaya.

"Is that some kind joke?" Hitsugaya replies. "I don't even drink."

Technically, there's a running joke in the SC offices about Hitsugaya placing, somehow, in _every_ poll. But the SC operates with a surprising degree of journalistic integrity—at least, for something Matsumoto considers an underfunded side project of the 9th. They don't manipulate or fabricate data, and on the whole, the denizens of Seireitei are exceptionally earnest poll-takers, even under the duress of postwar crisis.

"People trust you, that's all," she tells him.

But so had the 257 dead.

"Onizuka," he says, after a while. And when she doesn't immediately respond, he clarifies, "Onizuka Kensuke. 19th Seat."

Onizuka Kensuke is also dead. The day before, they'd laid his body in the ground together.

Matsumoto stays silent.

"His family ran a distillery, so he'd be a good fit."

Silence.

"Perhaps they still do."

Matsumoto re-folds the leaflet, Page 5 facing outward, and tucks it into her shihakushou. She does not turn back to Page 4.

—

_You suffer it._

—

258.

—

"I don't know how you can tell," says Renji, when Matsumoto asks if her captain doesn't seem quiet. More quiet, less quiet. Wasn't he always quiet? But maybe Renji isn't the best person to ask, because he's only here because he's not presently certain where Kuchiki is, what he's doing, what he expects Renji to be doing, or when he will return. The only thing Renji does seem sure of is that he hadn't been forgotten; he simply hadn't been invited.

The 6th had been spared mass casualties, if dozens fall short of "mass." The Kuchiki clan had been less fortunate. A thousand years, and apparently the Quincy remembered the name.

"Rukia is—" Renji stops.

Rukia is heartbroken. For her family, because whatever warmth the Kuchiki clan might lack, Rukia's heart has always bled for duty. And she loves her brother.

She is heartbroken for Ukitake. She is heartbroken for Ichigo, who has had to bear witness to so much of this. She is heartbroken for the world this one has revealed itself to be. She is heartbroken, she is heartbroken, she is—

Rukia is heartbroken and you can tell, is Renji's point.

 _You_ can tell, Matsumoto wants to say. Honestly speaking, Matsumoto knows Rukia better through others than first-hand. She hasn't seen Rukia since their last VC meeting, a lifetime ago. And similarly, Matsumoto realizes, Renji is only familiar with Hitsugaya's leadership. In his world, Hitsugaya gives orders or reprimands and otherwise says nothing.

"Where is he, anyway?" Renji asks, when he realizes Hitsugaya is not anywhere in the courtyard with them, is not one of the shinigami digging.

"He said he didn't feel well."

"Oh," says Renji. That's uncharacteristic, and there's no denying that. He noses Matsumoto's shovel into the ground, punching it deeper with his heels. "But… you are sick, aren't you? Like Kensei and Rose? That's not a secret."

To his point, Matsumoto is also resting at the moment, her wrists and ankles doubled in size and her fingers swollen like sausages.

"You know how captains are," says Renji, reassuringly, as though the captains of the Gotei 13 had much of anything in common, besides power. But maybe that's the corollary he means: A captain will take themselves to their limit, and then storm past it. Damn the consequences. Because that's supposed to keep Soul Society safe. It's supposed to keep their divisions safe.

There are 259 bodies in this courtyard, buried or waiting.

Beyond all doubt, Hitsugaya is over limit. He is the weather to Soul Society; they are the reapers to reapers. And they are still sick, though getting better. At least, Matsumoto is.

There's another piece to this, she knows. Not that she has room in her arms to hold another shard, but that's how these stories go.

"They fought beside each other, right?" Matsumoto asks, of Kuchiki and Hitsugaya.

Renji nods slowly. But what exactly had happened, when, and in what order, are not questions anyone in Soul Society is well-equipped to handle; and at this point in the recovery process, on days without sleep and nothing but the collection and organization of the dead, the clearing of rubble, the war happens in flares and flashbacks, not timelines.

"I'm not sure what I saw," says Renji. Not much—they'd been sent to Ichigo. All he knows is both captains had survived and it was hard to think too far beyond that, at this point.

He should be going, he announces. He'd like to swing through the 13th before returning to the 6th. He says it exactly like that—"swing through," like for the second it takes to utter the phrase he can convince himself that all is well. Sometimes a second is what you need.

He places a hand on Matsumoto's shoulder as he leaves. She feels his fingers grip her, just for a moment. She relaxes under his touch.

"I hear Kira's been allowed visitors now—he's been transferred from the lab to 4th, finally. If you're able," he says.

"Thank you," she says. She's been feeling stronger, lately; and she'd like to see Kira. "I'll ask my captain."

When, she doesn't know. It's not that he'd say no—the only thing Hitsugaya has given anyone for weeks now was permission. The 10th has had one of the least efficient postwar responses in all of Soul Society. Their only real command had been to leave the work: No one was to spend unbroken time staring at nothing but the grave, the bodies within.

Except him, and except her.

Matsumoto won't leave him alone in that now. Because she knows her captain. Conversation has always been easy between them, and Hitsugaya has instigated at least as many of these conversations as she—even without the pretense of administration, the Division, her seeming inability to take his deadlines seriously. Whatever his reputation, he's really not that quiet.

But these days, she meets his eyes and every time, there is more of a stranger in him. Disillusion. She doesn't know how to stop it, if she even should.

She's been here before, though, and she does not think she can survive it again.

—

Hitsugaya is nothing like Gin, she reminds herself. In no universe could he ever be. But he is also not much like himself, and no war will ever convince her that mere existence is good enough. That is not who Matusmoto is.

They stand at the edge of the grave and look deep.

Sometimes, she would rather be buried.

—

Kira slept through most of her visit, but it was just as well. Someone should sleep, and even under better circumstances, Matsumoto's often of the impression that it should be Kira.

Hinamori is still at the 10th when Matsumoto returns, curled into a small ball asleep on the couch, with Hitsugaya seated on the floor beside her head. Some hours earlier, she'd arrived carrying four parcels, because 4th cremates the dead. She's been helping Isane in Unohana's absence, working the bellows with her own fire, because straw and firewood are in such short supply. These four parcels had previously been shinigami who belonged to the 10th—officially, deaths by suicide, though their bodies were filled with Giselle's poison. They had died slow, in the hospice care of Hinamori and the 4th.

They had not wanted to kill themselves.

Hinamori hasn't left the 4th since the patients started coming in, Hitsugaya tells Matsumoto as he rises from the floor, grimacing. He reaches to steady himself with the couch-back. He looks flushed, completely exhausted, too thin.

"Learning healing arts on the fly," he says, edging past Matsumoto and out the door.

Matsumoto glances back at the small, pale ball on the couch before she follows him outside, leaving Hinamori to her rest. Even from a distance, she smells like cinders and sweat.

Hinamori would have liked to join the 4th, Matsumoto knows. She'd come to feel very much at home here in the wake of Aizen's defection, throughout her long and ongoing recovery. But she'd said she could never leave the 5th. Also because of Aizen.

When Matsumoto mentions Hinamori might feel able now, though, Hitsugaya isn't convinced. "Yamamoto would never have approved that transfer, even if she'd asked. Kyouraku won't either."

He takes her silence as disagreement, which it is, and adds, "As kind as he seems, Kyouraku has an iron will." He is no bleeding heart, and Soul Society has needs. They are not Hinamori's needs.

It's summer winter, after all. The birds have stopped circling; now they fly straight until they hit the hard walls surrounding Seireitei, and die.

Hinamori develops explosives, grenade nets and fireballs. She is too useful as a soldier to let her cobble together a healing practice. She has the instinct for triage, but no aptitude for more; she would never excel in the 4th. Never mind that frankly speaking, most shinigami do not excel anywhere, and that given the number of dead, Soul Society is in no position to be choosy. It will always nurture soldiers before healers. It will use her to its best advantage.

"Wherever those priorities get us now," Hitsugaya mutters darkly. Kurotsuchi will tire of playing pharmacist and surgeon sooner than later; he has his own experiments to tinker with. And the 4th has lost its captain; in another decade or four, it may well cease to exist. Unohana has no obvious successor. Isane isn't ready.

"Kyouraku wouldn't let that happen. And I'm sure he'd let Isane choose, as she rebuilds—if Hinamori asked—"

Hitsugaya shakes his head. "You know, Kira didn't ask to be removed from the 4th," he says, as darkly. "Ichimaru requested him."

That is, Aizen did.

Matsumoto opens her mouth to object, but Hitsugaya continues, "Unohana only accepted the transfer because she knew he'd never make Vice Captain as a healer." _We're all used to someone's best advantage._

"Kyouraku is not Aizen," presses Matsumoto.

Hitsugaya counters before she's even finished saying Aizen's name. "He is. We all are," he snaps.

He sounds cruel.

Matsumoto can't respond to that. Above them, the sky is a murky orange, sunset scratching through heavy winter clouds before getting caught in the smoke of some faraway field, burning to nothing. But she can hear the muffled kiai of work crews, chanting in unison as they heave, or cut, or shovel. She feels very little of Aizen in any of this; not the Aizen he'd become, in any case. There's nothing of that Aizen in Hitsugaya's summer winter, nor in the work of all the others. Together, they are crawling out of a wound. This is a different kind of power.

There's a flutter of movement in her peripheral vision, white like the birds from the sky. Hitsugaya sinking to the ground.

"Taichou—"

"It's fine." He holds his breath at the top of each sharp inhalation, as though the descent requires preparation. Maybe something hurts, or won't stop spinning. He doesn't get up.

He asks if Matsumoto would return Hinamori to the 4th.

—

"Hitsugaya-kun—he's not okay," Hinamori whispers. She's not talking about Giselle's poison, or even his general malaise. Neither are ideal, of course, but Hinamori's survived too much to worry prematurely about that kind of thing. All the same, she's scared.

"We're all recovering still," Matsumoto assures her. But Hinamori's sadness makes her nervous. Matsumoto's good at comfort, but there are things in Hinamori that are intractable—hers is the kind of infinite darkness you confront sometimes in dreams.

 _Deeper than you can reach,_ sings Gin, in her dreams. In Hinamori.

"He wasn't okay back then, either. I felt it when he—" she censors the verb and finishes, "me." She touches her chest.

She lets her fingers close into a fist. "After Aizen-t—" Again, censored, words pulled into infinite darkness. "After the defection. Was he okay?"

Again, Matsumoto doesn't think any of them were, or are. Hinamori already knows this. Truth be told, Matsumoto doesn't really remember what Hitsugaya had said or done; she'd been preoccupied with her own drowning at the time. She remembers he'd been kind.

Hinamori bursts into tears. Pulls into herself, like a black hole, and sinks to the ground. Draws breath like she's dragging her lungs up a washboard and gasps, "I'm sorry."

She has—almost no memory of that time, she says. She hates, she hates that. ("I'm sorry.") She hates that she doesn't know. She hates that she remembers so little of all those months, like she hadn't been there for anyone. ("I'm sorry.") Then she is dry-heaving, crying without sound or tears but with so much power she can't breathe. ("I— I— I—")

Matsumoto doesn't know if it's okay to touch her, or if that will make it worse. She sinks to the ground beside Hinamori and lets their shadows touch, growing longer as the sun sets.

 _There are so many bodies,_ Hinamori sobs.

There are so many bodies.

—

When they finally reach the 4th, Hinamori heads straight to the crematorium, resolute. She's done crying; she has a job to do.

"Please take care of Hitsugaya-kun," she says. "He hates this kind of thing."

She says it like there are any among them who love it. Like she can't yet trust there isn't.

—

It happens again. And again. Maybe fever brings it to the surface faster—since the end of the war, Hitsugaya has never really stopped being ill, is maybe getting worse. (It's not a maybe. Almost every new treatment Kurotsuchi has developed has worked better than the last; most of the time, Matsumoto can convince herself she feels almost well. Hitsugaya is not getting better.)

Whether there's anything causal there, that's where Hitsugaya exists now, everything roiling at his skin. Kyouraku, Aizen, the war, what various parties had or had not done and what it ever meant—it all dances around their conversations at odd moments, quiet for long and murky stretches before pushing back up like a splinter. Hitsugaya would love to know what Kyouraku was thinking when he loosed Aizen on the surface again. Then, of course, it's obvious; it was a war. But the weather! The arrogance of it all—Kyouraku playing god, asking them to join him. Then the weather doesn't matter, either. The war in its entirety, though—it had all been so fucking senseless. Every day for a thousand years Soul Society had been failed by its shinigami; its shinigami had been failed by their leadership; and what the hell had anyone done, because this war should never have happened. (War is inevitable; any god of death should understand how painful "balance" can be—it is not all or even often meditative.) But hiding behind some kind of natural order, when all they have _ever_ done is manipulate it—it's unacceptable. All these lives lost, that's the unacceptable part. All this death.

"Messing with shit we have no right to, for fucking centuries—"

Then he catches himself. Swallows.

There's no real logic to any of it, forceful punctuating squalls that build from nothing (everything) to nowhere. Matsumoto has tried to fit the pieces together—and it's likely so has Hitsugaya—but in the end it's only fractures. There is no sense to make of that much death, that much violence.

"I can't stop it," he says, not of the war but the ugly things he's saying. The aspersions. He swallows and swallows and swallows.

He's just so fucking frustrated, and he can't swallow it all. The best he can do is expect that it will come, then let it. This is a flash flood, a storm squall. This is a wound.

This is like Soul Society, after the war: Sometimes, pockets of reishi split open, alighting on some rogue kinetic energy, the memory of a battle, particles stirred to frenzy before they evening out to simple and unassuming atmosphere, as though nothing had happened.

It's exactly like that. Soul Society—the very fabric of the world they live in, the air they're breathing, the water in everything—is wounded. Maybe it's fatal.

According to Hitsugaya, they can kill as many monsters, or defectors, or invaders as they want—none of that will fix the shit that's led them here. It won't change the "society" that will keep them here. They will make the same mistakes again, because "we're arrogant enough to assume they're not mistakes," he says.

It's dangerous to say things like that, and it breaks her heart to hear them. It sounds halfway to treason, for one—but more than that, it sounds fragile, like you are at the limit of what you can weather, and the next will break you.

Matsumoto's captain has always been the kind of person who will bear what's required. He will swallow it whole. But this time he can't.

—

267.

—

He doesn't realize she's there.

He's sitting outside, back against the shouji, Hyourinmaru sticking up from the pretzel of his folded legs. He's slumped forward slightly, his forehead touching the blunt end of the blade. Gentle. Above, the clouds whip through the sky, moving and pushing until they form a thick blanket as far as the eye can see. It might seem peaceful if he didn't look so ill—febrile, too gaunt, everything the clouds are not. Once the clouds settle into formation, Hyourinmaru lists sideways, as does Hitsugaya. At the last moment, Hitsugaya catches them both. He draws a shuddering breath.

"The burials are nearly complete. It won't be much longer; you'll be able to let it go," Matsumoto says, hopeful reassurance.

"I don't think it will be that simple," Hitsugaya murmurs, without turning toward her. He's still bracing himself with his arm. His breath hitches again, and his grip tightens around Hyourinmaru's hilt until his knuckles stand out white. "There's something—"

He shakes his head. "I told him this would happen."

"You're not okay," says Matsumoto. "If you need to—"

Hitsugaya stops her. "This is separate matter. Though frankly, I'm losing track of all this." He gestures vaguely at his body. "I just—"

( _you should die together_ —the smell of blood and petrichor. wet smack of a body against ground. the sear of poison in her veins. darkness. the carcass of a giant's (at least his feet), frozen so intensely he comes apart in shards, like he is glass and was never flesh. she's never seen anything like it. never from her captain. what

did  
you

do?)

"It's not fighting me," he says. "The sky, I mean—it used to push back. I don't know if this winter can be stopped, even if I release tensou juurin."

There's nothing Matsumoto can say to that. It's unclear what causes seasons in Soul Society. She knows the Earth of the world of the living is round, and that it rotates as it revolves around the sun, causing night and day, summer and winter. But Soul Society is not a planet, nor a plane. It has no shape. Its seasons have no science—at least, not in that way. It's impossible to say what it is or isn't capable of. That's what she believes, anyway.

_This next thing will break you._

Matsumoto reaches for his shoulder, grips it the way Renji had with her. His bones feel sharp and she can feel his fever-heat, even through his haori. But this is a separate matter, he says.

"Matsumoto," he says, glancing at her hand.

She releases him.

"I don't know if I'll be able to stop it. I don't know if there will be anything left."

It's not guilt, exactly. But it is debt. It is 272 dead on his hands; it is righteous fury that there had been any war at all—fury at the march of history, the intractable blood feuds and cruelties and wholesale failures that could ever have brought them all to this place.

"I'm sorry," he says.

He's sorry for it all. For the dead, mostly. For not being able to keep Giselle from turning her. For causing her concern—for causing her pain. For the dead. "For what I've said about Kyouraku, too. It was uncalled for. I like him, too."

He's a captain of the Gotei 13 and this is the history they have inherited. It's his duty to accept it and he can't. That's what he's sorry for.

"But we can't rely on import rations forever. The living realm has its own climate dilemmas," he says. _We will suffer our mistakes._

—

Matsumoto can imagine a different summer, June passing naturally into July, the humidity rising and fireflies beginning to alight. Rooftops, nighttime clouds and peekaboo stars. Reading into them what she would, the sky full of promise. Hisagi weeping into his sake and even Ikkaku rosy-cheeked, half-naked.

Matsumoto has nothing for what she feels today.

—

Soul Society registers its first-ever earthquake at 3:59 in the morning, sixteen days after the end of the war. The aftershocks are small but lancing tremors, like a chill down a spine.

"Well. This will keep Kurotsuchi busy," Hitsugaya notes. "Soul Society can't have earthquakes."

Matsumoto's not sure how he manages to sound both brusque and faint, but she hates it. It's like a promise that everything is fine coupled with the certainty that nothing is. It makes her heart hurt and her lungs go leaden, especially given that Hitsugaya is not otherwise roused by the earthquake. Earlier he'd spiked a fever out of nowhere, high enough that he'd faded toward the office couch mid-task. He hasn't moved since. This is how the last few days have gone.

He is getting worse.

Soul Society registers what will turn out to be its second-ever earthquake at 4:07 in the morning. These aftershocks roll. Outside, she can hear the beginnings of panic.

"Do you have any orders for the 10th?" she asks him.

Nothing.

"Taichou?"

She leans over the back of the couch and finds him curled in on himself. (He and Hinamori are more similar than she'd thought.) She doesn't even need to touch him to feel the heat coming off him.

"A reaction to the medication?" she asks, touching the back of her hand to his cheek. She'd take him to the 4th, were it less a morgue right now. She'd—

She winces at the sudden chill when he stops suppressing his reiatsu. It coils into the room like a snake falling from a tree. Her cheeks burn as the cold abruptly snatches all the moisture from the air, drops it to the ground as frost. The tiles shudder on the rooftops.

The panic outside goes quiet, weighted by the pressure of his reiatsu, calmed. It's effective, if not intentional. But she's not sure if it's enough to quiet this fever.

"Landslides," he says suddenly. What about them, he's not sure. Or is, but the words slip away. Or isn't. "I—"


	3. 解凍

Soul Society cannot have earthquakes, in the truest sense. It doesn't have tectonic plates, or a crust, or a magma core. Maybe the quake is a ghost of something the Wandenreich had brought with them—a memory of the world of the living, imprinted into the shadows. Maybe it is simply Soul Society, falling apart.

—

"I work miracles and you spit in their face," Kurotsuchi snarls, some variation of which he's offered every time they come to the 12th for treatment. "If you want to die, I'm always in need of sacrificial lambs," he adds, which is new.

Matsumoto rarely finds Kurotsuchi unsettling—she's been around too long, maybe, and too familiar with Nemu to think Kurotsuchi a stranger—but these words gnaw at the edges of the pit within her, the one that already exists, the one that knows something is very, very wrong. Last night was far from a pleasant memory.

(They stopped to rest on the way to the 12th. The aftershocks of the morning quake were ongoing, dim but enough to make Hitsugaya stumble. He ran his fingers through his hair and let the sweat evaporate from his palms. The air temperature, she supposed, was whatever he wanted it to be. His fever was unabated.

"We had to stop the Sternritter. I had to try," is all he says. He'd done something. He'd done something and here was its aftershock, coming to devour him whole.)

All Hitsugaya says in response to Kurotsuchi's needling is, "I'm not a lamb."

"I don't mind killing lions."

"Permission not granted."

Kurotsuchi isn't satisfied; he wants more, and hides it poorly. "Were you less a child, you'd trade your years less freely. You'll regret it."

"That, coming from you?" Hitsugaya replies, and Kurotsuchi scowls.

"Don't play with things beyond your comprehension," he snaps. "It's childish. And rude."

Kurotsuchi seems most bothered by the fact that Hitsugaya had pulled it off, whatever "it" was. Hitsugaya and Kurotsuchi don't have much in common, but Matsumoto's captain can make an ice double so real it seems to breathe. He is, at this very moment, twisting summer from the sky itself. And she'd seen the remnants of that frozen giant. These are the kinds of practices Kurotsuchi both loathes and reveres.

"I want to finish the treatment for the zombie poison," says Hitsugaya, though his authority is undercut as he fades towards the 12th's strange round chairs. Kurotsuchi looms so close Hitsugaya has to crane his neck to meet his eyes. It makes him small. She watches a bead of sweat meander down the folds of his nape.

She hates, hates, when he is not in control.

"Giselle's poison has already outlasted you once," Kurotsuchi reminds him. He's enjoying this more than usual. With Hitsugaya, he always does. _The only reason you're still alive is because your reiryoku gave you the benefit of the doubt._

"Finish my treatment for the zombie poison," Hitsugaya repeats. He'll be no one's puppet.

Kurotsuchi grins, yellow. Two packets, neatly folded, unassuming. "For you both, then."

—

If this kills him, Matsumoto knows, it will be in part by Aizen's hand. This is a wound.

_He'll be no one's puppet, ever again._

—

The wreckage comes quickly. Faster than Hitsugaya was anticipating, because he's still with her when he collapses. It comes hard enough his body feels the pills like poison, his stomach, chest, throat all convulsing, trying to bring them back up. He gags.

Matsumoto panics—panic of the slow molasses kind, muting sound and dulling movement. She feels her knees hit the ground seconds late, her hands numb to touch as she guides them to the small of his back. She doesn't feel a body, just reiatsu. Feels his heartbeat like a hummingbird's.

"What happened—" Matsumoto finally asks, tentative, "after—"

After the Heat, after the Iron, after the Zombie.

"Nothing impressive," Hitsugaya grits out.

The simple version: He can hold his bankai just shy of thirteen minutes before his body begins to falter under pressure. He'd needed more than thirteen minutes.

After a long silence, punctuated only by the staccato of his breaths, Hitsugaya adds, "We're only reishi, in the end."

The less simple version: They are only reishi, woven in different combinations, particles transferring energy and enjoying combination on combination. Such is all of Soul Society. Their bodies are not so different from the atmosphere that surrounds them; both are mostly water, reishi, whatever do and don't exist between the two. Reishi is what binds the molecules together. While water isn't strictly his purview—he can only make ice, not melt it—he can do enough. He'd needed more than thirteen minutes, so he stole them. He had to.

A body and its atmosphere are also not so different, in that Hitsugaya absolutely does not understand them. He knew this ignorance would have consequences. He supposes these are them.

"I made a mistake, that's all," says Hitsugaya, before he passes out. He'd needed more than thirteen minutes, so he'd gone chasing power, just like everyone else. Just like Aizen.

That's all.

—

Akon is not accustomed to making house calls.

In fact, Matsumoto doesn't think she's ever seen Akon outside of the 12th's labs before. Judging by his reaction to the weather, it doesn't seem he often leaves them.

"It's not so bad out here," he comments, peering out the window and shading his eyes from nonexistent sunlight. "And this is summer? I thought it would be hotter."

Matsumoto glances at Hitsugaya's prone form.

It's sudden—she gulps air, room too small for her lungs and her lungs too small for her heart. She threatens, there's no telling what might happen to the weather if Hitsugaya loses control of it—if he's no longer present to control it. She refuses to believe it simply wouldn't notice, the way it is right now. What if he's the line between this broken place and complete inhabitability? They'd be forced into a shadow kingdom, a place that's not a place just like the Wandenreich, they'd— "You can't— you can't just let him die—"

"Well, of course not." Akon stops her. He does not seem to know what to do with his hands. "We're not actually supposed to let anyone die. Regardless of—"

He's really not sure how to respond to all the stuff about the weather. "Regardless of their apparent utility to Soul Society."

He looks at his hands, dangling at either side of his body, as though he's not sure what they are, or where they came from. Then he brings them to Matsumoto's elbows. It's a kind of embrace. But Akon is not the strange one, here.

"We're supposed to care for one another, aren't we?" he says.

 _What are you doing?_ she could scream at herself. Of course they're supposed to care for one another. But she was afraid— It just feels like—

It feels like the whole world will slip through the cracks if she doesn't save it. And she can't even help her captain.

"You have to help him," she says, in spite of herself. It does sound pitiful—she knows there are dead and dying aplenty, and the 12th are only healers adjacent. Akon has other duties. The business of the earthquakes, for instance.

Akon assures her that despite all appearances, her captain is not dying. Not like others are, acutely, at this very moment. Rather, Hitsugaya's body is at the limit of what can survive, so it is shutting down.

"How is that not dying?"

It's redirecting its energies, Akon revises. She might have noticed, he says, but there's not much finesse to the medication Kurotsuchi devised.

Matsumoto nods.

"It's basically designed to kill anything it doesn't think belongs. It's not our best work, but you needed something quickly. That's why there are so many side effects."

They've been working non-stop on this thing, Matsumoto realizes. In the lab, eternally, all to do their part. To do whatever it takes.

"But it's killing _him,_ not—"

"He's not dying." The reminder feels more pedantic than reassuring, but Akon touches her elbow again. "Anyway. The ethics of this are perhaps neither here nor there, but Kurotsuchi has all of you typed, to the particle. We used those maps to separate what's you from what's poison. But Hitsugaya-taichou's… changed."

He'd needed more than thirteen minutes, he'd said. And afterward, apparently he hadn't been able to put it all back quite right.

"The medicine won't work, then," says Matsumoto.

"Well, Giselle's poison has been eradicated. So technically, it's done everything we were told to make it do," Akon says, and he looks at her. "You're welcome, by the way."

"Thank you," Matsumoto offers belatedly, but Akon doesn't actually know what to do with the gratitude, as much as he still doesn't know what to do with his hands.

He holds them over Hitsugaya, murmuring an incantation. It's not a kidou Matsumoto knows. Akon reports, "The medication will run its course soon, and his condition should stop deteriorating. Other than that—"

He shrugs.

In high concentrations, reiryoku becomes its own support system, allowing its host to outlast whatever biology might dictate to be possible. What precisely it's capable of, Akon isn't sure. He's not a captain. Though frankly, he's not sure if Kurotsuchi would be able to know, either. With captains, you reach a point where you feel like you're not researching a body anymore, but a phenomena. Universes unto themselves.

This universe is 30 kilograms, wet. This universe is Matsumoto's.

They can usually make up most of the damage, Akon says, but he shrugs again. "Kurotsuchi already told you about the consequences of the initial mechanism, I trust. On top of the second-phase medication, then this… unexpected messiness. It does compound."

The promise of help gets lost in disclaimer.

Akon quests in his pockets, produces a small paper medicine packet. "For when he wakes."

"What is it?"

"Gentei reigan."

"Why?"

Akon gives her a quizzical look. "The name seems self-explanatory."

That's not what she meant. She's never known those pills necessary in any context but prison.

But Akon's on a different wavelength.

"I wanted to let you know that this," he says, gesturing vaguely at her heart, "is a traumatic response. There _is_ a predictable biology to this, and I find it helpful to remember that. But—maybe you're different, and need different things."

Another disclaimer.

Akon excuses himself and Matsumoto stays.

It's so quiet and empty, and she still can't quite hear the sound of Hitsugaya's breathing. She needs to confirm it with her eyes.

They are all reishi in the end, she thinks.

The more familiar you are with someone, the easier it is to tease their ribbon from the throng of them. The tangle of spirit ribbons in the skies of Soul Society is much reduced, but, if anything, less legible. Nothing feels quite right, no one feels the same, and that's the mark of war, isn't it. Hitsugaya's still feels familiar, but maybe not the same. Matsumoto hates that she can't tell.

No one is the same, though. Souls are not immanent; the universe is not immanent. Everything is mutable and it all can change in an instant. Or maybe it's been changing for a thousand years, and you just don't notice until the bottom drops out.

—

Hitsugaya's condition goes unchanged. Time unfolds, each second taking hours until suddenly all the daylight hours have been snapped up and stolen away, Matsumoto having accomplished nothing at all. The sky is flat and gray, snow falling faintly but never sticking.

But she has to do something.

She is vice-captain, she reminds herself. She needs to act like one.

Among so many other things to be attended to, there is a thick, haunting stack of death notices. One copy to be mailed to the family (if applicable); another for filing. They are untouched from where Hitsugaya had left them the day of the earthquake, which was only yesterday but an eternity ago.

It's hard not to see ghosts in even simple things. The few that Hitsugaya had already completed are not in his natural hand, but in the formal calligraphy characteristic of every shinigami who's been through the Academy. Aizen's calligraphy, technically speaking. The hand he'd taught them all.

Beside the unfinished certificates, a name dictionary is open to _Inamine._ Inamine Akira. He'd been their 17th seat for decades. For the first time, Matsumoto realizes she doesn't even know which "Akira" he'd used. On the patrol assignments, she'd always written it in katakana.

It's hard not to see the faces of the ghosts.

It feels shameful, sterile, to have to open a book to declare an old friend dead. (What right do you have to mourn, when you can't even write their name?) But it would be worse to get it wrong. It takes an hour to find the appropriate ledger, his enrollment papers yellowing, misfiled, and hastily scrawled.

Matsumoto forces herself to pick up the brush. To Hitsugaya's 稲嶺 she adds 韑.

She is only twelve certificates in when there's a knock at the door. More news out of Sabitsura, where the 10th had been patrolling before the Wandenreich invaded. During the fighting, a mountain had come down, and they'd all drowned in a sea of earth and stone. By the time the Kidou Corps had been able to deploy that far out, the earthquakes had further disturbed the site. The Corps found no sign of even the faintest emanations of reiatsu. No survivors.

"How many?" Matsumoto asks hollowly. "We're completing the burial of our dead—if there are more we'll need to—"

"Matsumoto-fukutaichou," the messenger cuts in. "Maybe you misunderstood me. We weren't able to find anyone. There are no bodies."

They're just gone.

—

It is ghosts all the way down.

—

291.

—

Hitsugaya looks like he's going to throw up. He's sifting through the certificates Matsumoto had finished the night before, for the landslide's dead.

"You're awake," Matsumoto greets him, with something like relief. She's not sure if she remembers how to feel it properly.

"More or less," he says. "Thank you for taking care of these."

He's bathed, hair still damp, but he's already earned a fresh sheen of sweat. He takes his seat carefully, as though any error might spell the end of his attempt at normalcy this morning.

He goes through the certificates again, to memorize the names.

"That makes more than half, then," he says quietly.

—

Yes, it does.

—

Hitsugaya takes the packet Akon had given her.

"Gentei reigan," she explains.

He opens the envelope and peers at the instructions, written in Akon's microscopic hand.

"Fantastic," he says, mirthless.

—

Hitsugaya says as little about his recovery as he had his deterioration. It's achingly slow, though. Matsumoto suspects the pills don't help. Some days it's all he can do to eat, nursing the same bowl of rice and millet swimming in tea until it is long past cold and the bloated grains of rice have begun to disintegrate. Some days are better.

The 6th and 11th have returned to patrol duty. The lesser Hollows had begun to take advantage of Soul Society's absence in the field, encroaching at the fringes of Rukongai. Aside from Nanao's supply chain, they haven't yet returned their energies to the living realm. They simply don't have the numbers.

The 10th has 185 survivors out of 476.

He'd like to speak with them all, check in. That he makes no concrete plans to do so seems a fair indicator of how ill he really feels.

Not that he could hide it. If he's survived thus far by dint of captain-class reiryoku, suppressing it the way those pills are meant to do sounds like suicide. By the looks of him, probably feels like it.

"I had to do _some_ thing," Hitsugaya repeats, of his role in their thousand-year war. A war begun so long ago few of them had been alive to start it. Hitsugaya certainly hadn't been. So he'd gone chasing power, more than he could handle, and now it's chasing him. Ergo the pills, to keep it back.

—

The 10th has noticed his absence. There's too much absence to miss—people gone, dead and buried. Hitsugaya is none of these, but the weight of their dead makes every vacancy feel like the cusp of calamity.

"Can I—" asks an unseated officer, peering around the office door. He is so freshly minted Matsumoto doesn't even know his name. He must have joined between the two invasions. "Is there anything I can do to help you or— Or Hitsugaya-taichou?"

Hitsugaya isn't here today. It's just her.

The officer is old enough to be Hitsugaya's father, maybe feels that way. He must be from Rukongai; most of the new recruits are fairly young—always young, if they're from within Seireitei. He's lost his accent, though, or learned to hide it. He seems well-meaning enough, though perhaps too new to know that their captain is not a child, and it would be folly to treat him as such. But maybe that's unkind. Maybe he simply wants to help. He is not too new to know how many died that he might live.

"Please take care," Matsumoto says. She doesn't know why she says it or what she means by that, but the man looks willing to figure it out. He nods seriously.

Still, he hesitates before he sees himself out, scanning the room, its emptiness, wanting his captain to be there. Wanting some security. Every day of his appointment has been a royal mess, probably. She hates that, because it's not the reputation Hitsugaya deserves. Matsumoto doesn't want to know what the popular rumor had been with regard to his missing bankai, nor what the rumors might be now.

"Can you—" he stops. It's not his place to ask. He does anyway. "Can you make sure you take care, too?"

Matsumoto doesn't cry, not even after he's gone and she's alone again. His trust hurts, his care. She hadn't been expecting it and she doesn't know why.

She draws another name on another death certificate, in the hand that Aizen taught them all.

Maybe she has an inkling.

—

Renji is concerned about the clouds. He is concerned enough to show up in the offices of the 10th, unannounced and uninvited. Out of politeness, he ignores Hitsugaya's ashen pallor. Out of boldness, he keeps talking.

The clouds, you see, are thick and low-lying. "It just makes me wonder what might gather in the skies above them. Doesn't that pose a security risk? What if there's a thick blanket of Hollows spreading out over Soul Society that can't be seen?"

"Surely someone would notice that," Hitsugaya says tartly. It's a ridiculous and paranoid proposition, even for Soul Society. But it is also not Renji's paranoia, and Matsumoto can tell that piques her captain's interest.

"I'm afraid of the clouds!" Renji insists, halfway between a bark and a shout. He bows low.

"You're supposed to bring these concerns to Kuchiki," says Hitsugaya.

Renji holds his bow. "Forgive my desire to save face," he says.

It's not his face he's saving.

—

"Abarai's got balls, coming all the way out here with a request like that," Hitsugaya says after Renji has excused himself, and he comes across so casually Matsumoto is concerned for a moment Hitsugaya's forgotten where he is, with whom he's speaking. It hasn't been his strongest day.

But it's for her, isn't it. Just like Renji, for his men. Hitsugaya scowls after Renji, before tapping a ream of documents into a crisp bundle and setting them at the edge of the desk. But when he glances at Matsumoto, he only looks worried. Well, exhausted and worried.

They are completing the last (hopefully, the last) of the death certificates. The office air itself feels thick with formality, the weight of them, all the seals and solemn brush ink spidering from page to atmosphere. When she closes her eyes she still sees the names of the dead.

When she opens them, Hitsugaya still looks worried. About her.

—

The next morning, Matsumoto wakes to sunlight, slatted patches of warmth against her cheek as it passes through the window. Beyond her futon, she thinks it might be colder than before. Nevertheless, the change in the mood of Soul Society, from the courtyard to the streets, is palpable. The sky is so, so bright.

 _Hitsugaya-taichou must be happy!_ someone sing-songs, as though the weather were a mood ring. _Giving us sunlight! Finally!_

It's the day of Ukitake's funeral. It has been 33 days since the end of the war. Most of the dead are buried now, though they've been told to expect more recoveries as the months go by. The rice fields are still burning, but last night's sleet pulled the smoke out of Seireitei, shunted it up and over the western mountains.

Of the many things Hitsugaya is feeling today, happy is probably not one of them. Matsumoto attends the funeral alone.

Kurotsuchi ignores her, stands no nearer even though Hitsugaya and Nemu's absence creates a wide and obvious chasm. Hisagi's eyes meet Matsumoto's from across the formation. Kuchiki's, too. When she looks to Renji, he's staring at Rukia.

Today, Rukia is burying her captain.

(There is no body.)

Technically, it is a funeral for all the dead, not just Ukitake. Ukitake's name is a vessel for the 291 of the 10th, the thousands of others. There are plenty of bodies.

"Thank you," Renji tells her after the ceremony, cheeks cold-raw but bright under the sun. Then he drops his gaze. "I'm sorry if I— If he—"

"It's a separate matter," she assures him, and mostly believes it.

"Matsumoto-fukutaichou," Kyouraku says as he approaches, and Renji swallows whatever else he was going to offer. "Would you walk with me?"

—

Kyouraku leads her underground. Matsumoto had heard of such a thing existing under the 1st, mostly in the context of sewers. (Modern plumbing in Seireitei is scattered seemingly at random through various divisions. For its part, the 10th draws well water.)

After some time, however, the tunnel opens into a cavern filled with green. Sasakibe's tea fields—Matsumoto had heard of these, too, though only in the form of urban myth. It turns out they are very much real: It's warm here, and it does not feel cavernous, nor underground at all; this place is fed by its own artificial sun and breeze and rich mineral streams. It is a world unto itself.

"It's a shame," Kyouraku says finally. "Sasakibe had never quite mastered the climate required for his assam teas to flourish, though he'd been edging ever-closer."

They are standing in the midst of the most skillful artificial ecosystem Soul Society has ever created. They are standing in its wreckage. The spellwork is beginning to fade now, Sasakibe's hanafuda crumbling without his deft hands to renew them. The plants are thriving, at least for a while yet; it is beautiful. But already dead, in all ways that are meaningful. It just hasn't shown it yet. Sasakibe is gone.

"But it might be possible to recreate it," says Matsumoto. "Given enough time—"

 _Rangiku-san_ , he tells her, _it's likely we have neither world enough nor time._ Even if they could decipher the process, this is Sasakibe's purview, and no one's talent but his own.

This greenhouse is only a reminder of people you need to be alive, but aren't. There are no miracles to be found here. No happy endings.

"I wanted to show you where I started," Kyouraku explains. "I'd heard of this place, but Sasakibe and Yama-jii never told anyone how to find it, not even Ukitake and I. So it took me some time to find it."

In the meantime, they'd had over two thousand bodies to bury.

Shinigami aren't known for their long memories; so what was several hundred bloated, seeping corpses in the span of a millennia? After several hundred years, the past loses its edges. They will all forget this, in time.

But Kyouraku believes that Soul Society, the superorganism, does not forget. This is why they are the way they are. They carry the damage, even as the memory of its arrival flickers and dims. And he'd wanted to spare them that, as much as he could.

Maybe that was worth the cost to their ecology; maybe it wasn't.

"This is where our ideas might differ," Kyouraku says, of Hitsugaya. He keeps his gaze on Sasakibe's tea. "Though in the end, I suspect they don't. Of course, I'm only his Commander, not his Vice Captain. What do I know?"

Matsumoto feels the heat rise in her cheeks.

"In any case, I found there were no answers here. I thought there might be, and that all concerns about damaging the climate might be laid to rest. But now you see what I found instead."

Matsumoto closes her eyes. It's so warm here. She'd already forgotten air could feel like this. It might never feel like this again. Not in Soul Society.

"I trust you'll relay what I've shown you to Hitsugaya-taichou."

"It wasn't intended as a slight," Matsumoto says, of Hitsugaya's absence.

Kyouraku laughs. "I didn't suspect it was; he's been in touch. Strange for the Gotei 13, I know, but perhaps we've learned at least one lesson, these last few years."

Eventually Kyouraku speaks again. "He also told me that he plans to be okay. I trust that he will."

"But what if it's not up to him?" Matsumoto blurts out.

Kyouraku bends to pull a weed from Sasakibe's assam field. "Well, well. Ukitake worried about him, too. Ukitake worried about everyone, of course. But the Gotei 13 is not a gentle place for youth, nor for people with strong opinions about how things should be done. So his worries were particular in Hitsugaya-taichou's case."

"But the Gotei 13 decides how things should be done."

"So we're led to believe."

Matsumoto bites her tongue at the tip. "You're saying it's not up to him. That being okay—"

Kyouraku holds a finger to his lips, silencing her, but he doesn't immediately speak. Maybe he's reluctant to speak ill of the dead, even if it's not ill he's truly speaking. "Ukitake has—he had—a larger heart than me. He wanted to protect everyone. He didn't want to see anyone throw themselves against a wall they'd never break," he says. "We fought about this sometimes. I suppose I'm more inclined to trust that they will succeed, no matter the cost."

He'd trusted Ukitake.

Kyouraku pulls another weed.

—

Later that night, Renji tells Matsumoto what had happened on that first postwar deployment. The one before he'd come to the 10th about the clouds. It had been a strange mix of careless ease and frank terror. It was good to be back in the swing of things, but it scared them to know things might go so wrong they'd need their vice captain to stay the course. Renji says it was only a copse of Gillian, shuffling into Hokutan from a breach in the sky, but all his men could seem to think about was the hollowness behind them, rather than before: Soul Society gutted and scorched. _Focus on the Hollow in front of you!_ Renji had shouted, and they had, and for the span of a skirmish all became fluid, like the well-oiled dispatch of old. But seeing them home still felt like he was giving marching orders to ghosts.

This is what it means to be war-torn.

"Now you sound like Rukia," says Renji. He spits, breath puffing out white and thick like a smokestack. "But we're all doing whatever the fuck it takes, right? We're protecting each other, no matter what!"

It'll get you in trouble, sure. It will probably hurt, Renji says. But it will never be wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gentei reigan (限定霊丸) is something I made up, as far as I know. But it's basically just gentei reiin (the limiter seals they use in the living realm to cut captain/VC power) in pill form. In fact, it's literally the same thing, except with the kanji for "symbol" switched to the one for "pill," LOL. That's just how Soul Society do.


	4. 龘

She is surrounded by herself  
Inside out she'sinsideout the walls of herself close in and all she can smell is blood all she can see is nothing until white  
White reiatsu.  
 _You should die together._

—

She's awake. The nightmare doesn't end. She can't move her arms, legs. Maybe she is dying after all. She is awake but her body sleeps on. Maybe this is what it means to die as a shinigami. She is very much inside herself.

She's alone.

The paralysis ebbs. She's fine.

She's alone.

_You should die together._

The tears punch up from the pit of her stomach, enlisting her lungs before her eyes. She sobs, loud and racking, in a way she hasn't since perhaps ever, ever in her life. Hinamori never told her it could feel this good. The sound, the air in her lungs, feels like gold, filling cracks. It feels full—and when the splinters of pain, sorrow, dread push up it feels like holding them, binding around the puncture. It feels like pulling the hands from her throat. It feels, it feels

until her throat is hoarse and her skin feels tight, salt drying on her cheeks in the dark. She breathes deep, deeper.

She brushes the hair from her forehead.

She breathes.

There's a knock at the door.

"Matsumoto," Hitsugaya says, before entering the room. The kidou light he'd walked the corridors with floats to the ceiling, light fanning out dim, but warm.

She wonders how much of her he'd heard. Enough to come looking; he's never been inside her quarters before. Enough to brew tea.

"This is from Hisagi, isn't it?" Hitsugaya asks, gesturing with the tray. He doesn't say anything about her tears.

"The cinnamon and cardamom one," he specifies, words uncertain in his mouth and their meaning even more so. For all the tea the 10th has drunk together, Hitsugaya's taste is not adventurous. This tea, he's made for her.

Matsumoto watches him canvas her unfamiliar room. Most rooms in Soul Society all look the same, sparse and expansively open, a hodgepodge of traditional and Western styles but otherwise unremarkable. Matsumoto's is no different, but for the heavy drape blocking the light from her window and the open parade of cloth and fabric that lines her southern wall—every one of her kimono, every outfit from the world of the living, all on colorful display.

"Did you need something?" she asks, taking the cup he offers her.

"No," he lies.

"I'm fine now. You don't have to stay."

"Muguruma mentioned nightmares, too," he says.

 _(you should die together)_  
( _There's nothing anyone can  
do, is  
there? Rangiku-san._  
She feels cold, thin fingers grip her shoulders, then snake around her neck, back again.  
His breath was always sweet, though.)

She's always had nightmares.

"You spoke to Muguruma-taichou? How is Hisagi?" she asks.

Hitsugaya says nothing for a moment. Then he says, "I didn't ask."

Matsumoto remembers the look in Hisagi's eyes. That look—every single time. Every single day. She sees it in Hitsugaya's too. "You don't have to stay," she says again. "You should sleep."

Hitsugaya snorts. "What's sleep?" He says the word like it's twin to cinnamon, or cardamom. He'll leave if that's what she really wants, he says. Otherwise, she can stop telling him he doesn't have to stay. It's bothersome.

"I'd like to stay," he revises.

He just looks so tired.

"Do you need water?" he asks.

She lifts her tea cup.

Hitsugaya chuffs. "Of course."

He _is_ so tired.

She's never wanted anyone to stay more deeply in her life.

They sit like that until the tea is drained, until the sky outside begins to purple with dawn.

"Renji wanted me to thank you," she says. "For the sun."

"The sun was always there. I didn't do anything to it," Hitsugaya replies. "The clouds were only to keep the warmth in at night, anyway. I shouldn't have been leaving them during the day in the first place."

Humoring Renji hadn't been difficult. Even at—Hitsugaya searches for an appropriate phrase—present capacity. He looks uncomfortable, though. It was easy because it hadn't fought him. Not for weeks. Soul Society's atmosphere had well and truly lost its natural cycles—lost the autonomous dance of barometric pressure and the forming and reforming of atoms, the exchange of energy as heat. As he'd feared.

It had been like casting a ripple in still water, rather than a sea.

A small earthquake rolls through Soul Society, rattling their empty tea cups against the tray. Gentle, yet ominous. A sign of life? Of retribution? Or perhaps it's like Sasakibe's tea fields. Autonomous energy, but only in its final release, its one last breath.

"There was an earthquake during my first solo deployment in the living realm," Hitsugaya says suddenly, watching the waves of her many kimono as the building shakes.

He'd never encountered the soul of a human freshly dead before then. Most of the spirits he'd laid to rest had been long dead, hungry and twisting into vengeful.

But then, this earthquake.

The earthquake liquified the earth. It triggered a landslide, and it swept 29 people to their deaths, near instantly. Their souls, unable to tell whether they were living or dead, stayed trapped under the sea of earth. They were ghosts; there was nothing keeping them pinned under earth but the memory of having once needed a body. A memory they couldn't let go.

"There was nothing I could have done but make it worse," Hitsugaya says. He could freeze the ground and make it feel that much more impenetrable. That was about it. Really, all he'd done that night was bear witness to the screaming.

"I always figured that was the lesson we were meant to learn from those deployments," he says.

"What lesson was that?" Matsumoto asks. She thinks of their earthquake, their landslide, and their dead. Very little had felt instructive in that.

Hitsugaya shrugs. "I don't know. Something about death, or power."

It had hurt, in any case—having to stand there listening. To be unsure if this helplessness was his failure, or whether it was by design. At the time, it had felt like the pain was meant to be a lesson learned. "Now I just think Soul Society had never really thought it through."

It's both infuriating and freeing, to think of Soul Society being built on traditions with so little foundation. So little meaning. Or that something as empty as this thousand-year war could still claim so many lives as it toppled to the ground. But if it's really all so empty, then maybe it can all be left behind. Perhaps you need live under its shadow no longer.

"Of course, we do keep making the same mistakes," Hitsugaya qualifies, though it's absent the vitriolic fury that had compelled him previously. Still, he doesn't seem terribly impressed by Kyouraku's tale of tea fields. Kyouraku had needed to do something, and Kyourau knew there would be consequences.

Hitsugaya's already told that story.

"And you'd both do it again," says Matsumoto.

"We shouldn't," says Hitsugaya, but Matsumoto knows she's not wrong.

They all would. They will protect each other, with whatever it takes.

This does not change the fact that the consequences are very real. Whether the harm he'd done the atmosphere was inevitable or not—twisting it, dominating it—it is still harm. And the rest of what makes up this world is not prepared for the changes wrought to the climate. The trees, the insects, the understory, the small game—it's all connected, and it likely won't survive.

"They shouldn't have to pay for our mistakes," says Hitsugaya. Not the way so many already have for this war. This is what he'd come to her to discuss.

Maybe, maybe, you don't just suffer it.

"I spoke to Hinamori," he says. "We might have a plan."

—

Soul Society is on fire. The fields that have been smoldering for weeks, the highlands caught in the crossfire of war—now they're curtains of tall flame, the smoke like storm clouds raining ash like snow. Matsumoto directs as much of the ash as she can away from Seireitei and away from Rukongai, toward the mountains.

It's still hard to breathe.

Hinamori says she's magnified it as much as she can—kidou nets spread like minefields, laced with white accelerant. The fields will burn even when there's nothing left. They will burn longer and hotter than anything Hinamori can control.

"I hope it's enough," she says, smudging the ash on her cheeks as she tries to wipe it away. Her ponytail lashes out around her.

Matsumoto has her hair tied back, too, but it stings her cheeks. She watches Hinamori quaver in the wind before adjusting her stance against it.

If it's enough, the blazes will superheat the air, punching it skyward as it expands. If it's enough, it will form a brutal wind.

"Is Hitsugaya-kun ready?" she asks, eyes squeezed shut against the gale. Surely she can feel him, though.

"We need to get inside," says Matsumoto, pointing to the gate, Jidanbou holding for them.

—

It's Hinamori's plan, Hitsugaya explains, back in her bedroom. Dawn plays out against the western wall.

He says: If Soul Society is only dead air, then perhaps what it needs is a shock to the system. A catastrophe so great it sets the winds, the pressure dance, in motion once again. Hinamori knows how to make a bomb.

"It makes sense," Hitsugaya does and does not explain. Not that he knows much about fire. But hot air expands, rises, creates wind—quickly and expansively enough, and that wind can become a storm. By contrast, cold air is dense air. Superchill the air, and it will drop like a stone through itself. Hot and cold air, spinning. High and low pressure forcing atoms into a brutal, dangerous dance. "As you're well aware, ash lowers the freezing point of the moisture in the air. With as much ash as these wildfires will produce, I can drop the temperatures considerably before we have to deal with any ice."

Together, they can create the storm of the millennia. Enough to salvage an atmosphere, maybe.

"What about you?" she asks.

"If we do this right, the cold air should help feed the flames, not quell them. I just need to be able to maintain that balance."

"What about you?" Matsumoto asks again. It takes Hitsugaya a moment to realize what she means.

He keeps his gaze fixed at a slat of dawn coming through her windows. "I think it will help," he says.

It doesn't sound like it will. It sounds like one more thing his body cannot handle.

For the first time in a long time, she thinks of the child he'd been when they first met. Seeping ice out around him uncontrollably as he slept. Threatening to burst open. He has never felt closer to that child than now.

"When I changed my body to—" he starts. Stops. Restarts. "Hyourinmaru is a dragon," he says.

Hyourinmaru is gentle. Hyourinmaru is brutal. Hyourinmaru will fill the space he's given. Hyourinmaru cannot have anticipated that space might contract. Right now, Kurotsuchi's pills are helping keep the excess back. But Hitsugaya's hoping that as he releases this excess into the storm, Hyourinmaru will recognize the true—and lesser—limits of this vessel, and will recalibrate.

"Hope" is not an odd Matsumoto feels willing to bet on. When she asks why he couldn't simply explain this to Hyourinmaru, Hitsugaya frowns.

"Hyourinmaru is a dragon," he repeats.

You can't just talk to a dragon. They do not hear in soundwaves—nor in the infinite quickness of synaptic leaps, neurons electric. They think in centuries, breathe in millennia. They feel in spans of time not captured by the solar calendar. The language they speak with each other is trust.

"We wouldn't have this problem if I hadn't deceived him in the first place," Hitsugaya offers as assurance. But he'd had to do something, anything.

"But you'll still need to channel the excess. Releasing that much reiatsu…" Even if he weren't ill, if his body weren't so spent—

But then, reiryoku is what's kept him alive. Like fire and ice, the systems are not so simple. It's why they should not be messed with. It's why now, perhaps, they must be.

It's not a full explanation; maybe he doesn't have one. But it's clear he does have a deadline.

This plan puts Soul Society in the palms of his hands. It has to work.

Hitsugaya has his eye sockets in the palms of his hands. He draws a shuddering breath.

—

Rukongai is empty. Its souls have filled the empty halls and undergrounds of Seireitei. They glut the streets. They pinch in on rooftops, in alleys, in every inch of space provided. From the 50th district outward, its denizens refused safe harbor, and have taken to the mountains, the far and distant seas. They have no need nor desire for anyone's safe harbor but their own.

Of those that did, Matsumoto wonders how many will find Seireitei a place they'd prefer to never leave. Even before the war, so much of it lay empty. Perhaps this storm will change this world in more ways than one. (Perhaps that is too hopeful.)

"You can feel the heat from here," Matsumoto says of the wildfires Hinamori is coaxing from the smolder. There are hillsides and valleys and villages on fire.

Hitsugaya nods. He's already working the weather in response, building the storm. His jaw clenches.

"Are you okay?" she asks.

"I'm just scared. That's all."

He doesn't sound scared. This is Hinamori's plan, and he trusts her. He trusts her through her sword at his throat, through her pain and his, through all it's taken to survive this far.

"This is a different kind of power," she reminds him.

"We can debate that later."

He glances over his shoulder at her, one last time. Then he raises Hyourinmaru.

Hitsugaya's release hits her like a sucker punch. It's a familiar pressure, but he's generally more careful; he lets the cold roll in like a season, beginning before he releases and billowing out in gradations thereafter. Today he goes off like a bomb.

Matsumoto's even less prepared for the second shockwave—bankai. Suddenly the air is too cold to breathe. Her throat aches, tightens, twists like it's wringing the air out instead of taking it in.

Hitsugaya's breath catches, too, and when Matsumoto looks up (when did she double-over?) his breaths are coming in quick, shallow puffs of condensation.

Already, there is only one ice flower above him, petals shining with melt.

—

The storm is ugly. The skies turn seaglass, heralding tornado winds. Its green is bitter, ash-filled, kin to the murky ice that slams from dark clouds like daggers, then cannons, then retaining walls. Like a castle coming down. The wind makes even Seireitei's war gates keen.

Matsumoto catches herself wishing it would end, before she remembers they're supposed to hope that it won't. Not entirely.

Hinamori's eyes are steel as she watches the sky.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
_There is no body that can contain all the grief left in the wake of a war. Let your heart take it in. Don't expect that your heart alone will save you._

_Bury it. It's okay to bury it. You will never hide it all; you are not meant to._

_Push it to your edges. Push it past them. Push it into the hands of the body beside you. Take theirs. See it in the sky, and in the mountains._

_It's okay._

_It must go somewhere._

_See it in dreams._

_(It must all go somewhere.)_

_You will live with it forever. You will live._

_Let the wind take it. Let the wind take you. Let the wind shape you both, like sand._

_It will all go somewhere._

_Go with it._


	5. 二ヶ月後 (epilogue)

For the first time in the history of modern Seireitei, Kyouraku's literature tutorial logs perfect attendance. It has been three months since the end of a thousand-year war.

During any given session previous, perhaps a tenth of those enrolled have ever attended at once, the rest having been pulled away by deployments and other duties—and, as Nanao has put it, "an extreme desire to avoid the florid, tooth-rotting prose that comprises _Rose-colored Path_."

("They're vocabulary stories," Kyouraku tutted at her. "What better way to learn these kanji than by way of florid prose?"

"They're vile.")

The Gotei 13 knows the language of war, business, survival. In these regards, it's more or less literate, though Kurotsuchi's noted some reports are more eloquent than others (and some, he notes, often and fruitlessly, do not exist at all). Beyond this, the reading and writing skill of nearly all of those younger than a thousand years or so is rudimentary at best, and this weakness shows in their poetry and—according to Kuchiki Ginrei, long ago—their temperaments.

And so, Kyouraku's literature tutorial. For the sake of culture. For the sake of Soul Society.

His regulars are there—Hinamori, Kira, Renji. And Hisagi, who'd happily returned once Kensei had taken over full leadership of the 9th. Shinji, who is almost certainly there to people-watch rather than partake; he doesn't need the kanji lesson.

Matsumoto is also present—her attendance, while not regular, is marked by the fact that she's the only one who seems to enjoy the novel enough to remember its plotlines. And Hitsugaya, whose attendance in the last few decades may not even have hit double-digits. He doesn't particularly look like he wants to be here now.

But one must mark the end of a war somehow; and what better way than the luxury of poesy?

("This isn't poesy," Nanao said once.)

Kyouraku can see it in all their eyes—their need of this moment, of the task of stuttering through recitations and replicating stroke orders over and again, until the characters are committed to memory. The need hangs over them, heavy as the sky.

Matsumoto is still worried about Hitsugaya. Kyouraku can tell by the way she hovers over him, flitting like a hummingbird to greet all her friends but always returning to his side, like he's a child on his first day of class. Hitsugaya lets her.

"Shall we read the first passage?" Kyouraku begins.

It's as though every word he's ever taught has been lost to the last few months, the last year, the last series of Seireitei's destructions. Even Hinamori flushes as she stutters through her recitation, words escaping her like so much dust through her fingers.

This is what is lost to war.

It's not the same as the bodies they buried—the thousands of bodies buried—but it's another tally in the ledger. Language is how you remember beautiful things, commit memory, reach out for what exists beyond battle and death and one's duty to it.

They are all here to pick up the pieces.

"I mean, I'm here for the booze afterward," Shinji clarifies.

They are all here to pick up the pieces.

—

Out of respect for his rank, Kyouraku has never once called on Hitsugaya to read aloud during these tutorials. Hitsugaya's eyes flit from the page to the chalkboard as Kyouraku writes out characters, radical by radical, and Kyouraku watches him copy the characters onto a borrowed sheet from Hinamori's notebook and learn them—for the day or for eternity, it's difficult to say. He has no talent for literature, and has said as much. He's studious, but not ambitious. But even if he were, it would still be another thousand years before he knew enough to read this book.

He's young, which has put him behind; and he's a captain, which has only widened the gulf. The 10th rests on his shoulders: He will never have enough time to attend these tutorials frequently enough to gain by them.

That will be true for many years to come. There is so much work to be done in Soul Society. So much to rebuild; so much to refuse to repeat.

For now, maybe it's only something frivolous. Maybe that's all it needs to be. They are in each other's company.

"Apoplectic," Matsumoto repeats. "This one seems useful, doesn't it, taichou?"

Hitsugaya glares at her, embodies the phrase. He knows the word by definition and sound, but when he looks at the card, there's no recognition there. He can't read it. Matsumoto tests a stroke order by dragging her finger over the characters printed on the card. (Incorrectly.)

They are all here to pick up the pieces.

—

They've been stockpiling beer rations for months in order to have this party. All the bottles are empty within the hour. Kira is all but naked, weeping, complaining of the chill, pointing in Hitsugaya's general direction. Hinamori, also weeping, is trying to pull Kira's arm through one of the legs of his hakama.

"This is gin," Shinji explains, waggling a large square bottle he's produced from the depths of his own personal stash before raising another. "And this is tonic."

He slams them onto the table. "This is how you really party."

Applause. More tears. Renji and Matsumoto hold each other in a way that, were Rukia a very different woman, she likely would not abide.

Shinji lets the group pass the bottle between them like the bones of the dead. YOU ARE THE BEST CAPTAIN IN THE WORLD, Hisagi shouts, before his eyes go wide and he turns beet-red. DON'T TELL KENSEI, he adds.

Shinji, promising nothing, flashes two fingers in a peace sign and removes himself from the fray, dead sober. He smiles wide as he passes between Kyouraku and Hitsugaya. Shrugs and says, "Kids these days, huh, Shunsui?"

It's all a Shinji sort of kindness, to sit through a lesson he doesn't need before supplying libations to a party he wasn't attending, all the while studying the corners of Soul Society like he thinks there might be something to pull back.

"He doesn't trust you yet, does he," Hitsugaya says, once Shinji is gone.

"A common sentiment," Kyouraku chuckles.

"I apologized."

Kyouraku shrugs. "Shinji knows me too well. I don't mind needing to earn it."

Hitsugaya glances up to meet Kyouraku's gaze.

He's looking better. His haori hangs less sharply on his shoulders. But there's a distance to him, wider than before, and not at all like before. Looking at him feels less like seeing a person than it does an idea. An ice field. A glacial procession—a journey of a thousand thousand years.

("He's—" Matsumoto had reported, after the storm. He's alive. She was not sure what else to say.)

Hitsugaya wouldn't have joined in these particular festivities before, either. It's nothing so simple as that. What Kyouraku doesn't feel is Hitsugaya's warmth. The intensity of his care, which has more than once surged into poor decisions but needful acts. That deep resolve to protect moments like these (Matsumoto kisses Hinamori, all tongue) even if he doesn't understand them. His love.

Hitsugaya is trying. His eyes are at work, as though he's chasing down a stroke order, all the unfamiliar characters that sprawl across the page. He misses their meaning, tries to grasp for it.

Here's what Kyouraku knows: The longer a shinigami lives, the harder it becomes for them to know how to do the right thing. Wisdom is gained with age, but only to a point; once you've witnessed a thousand years, two, it feels you've seen them all. You coil into your ways, like Mayuri (though he was always like that), or else find it difficult to understand the urgency of a single moment, the meaning of one act over another. If you behold enough time, it's so hard to see its summits and troughs—it's the wide plain you see, the average.

They are all reishi, in the end. Live long enough to forget those vital urgencies, become more element than entity. Maybe it's where they all are heading.

It's something he and Ukitake had talked about a lot. Unohana and Yama-jii had had their own ways back, but he and Ukitake had taught themselves together—how to tighten their clocks, focus their hearts. Shinigami were not born to be universes; they figure they needn't rush.

Of course, sometimes duty calls.

"It must be lonely without him," Hitsugaya says.

Without Ukitake. Without Unohana and Yama-jii and Komamura and the so many thousands dead. Without those Kyouraku has witnessed century upon century upon century beside. Without Ukitake.

"We spent some time in the archives together," Hitsugaya continues. "Some" is his way of defining the hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours Kyouraku knows they'd spent so disposed.

Ukitake had enjoyed reciting them, slowly enough for Hitsugaya to match sounds to characters, pick up what he needed in order to read the rest on his own—all in that singsong way that helps commit words to memory, the singsong way that Rukia is now so good at.

"He was very kind," says Hitsugaya.

There is so much of him in them. Kyouraku's heart twinges. There is so much of shinigami in each other. _There is so—_

There is an ice field. Hitsugaya hasn't lived nearly long enough to be spread so thin.

He is trying.

Here is what Kyouraku believes: Hitsugaya plans to be okay. He is too young to forget what he's missing. Too trusting not to know it when he sees it.

And when he chases it, he will not be alone.

Hinamori is laughing. On what appears to have been a dare, Hisagi has braided Matsumoto's and Renji's hair together, conjoining them in a way that, in their present state of inebriation, they are unable to resolve. Amidst the peals of Hinamori's laughter—it is such a bright sound—she asks if it had been Tousen who taught Hisagi to braid. The name doesn't cut, the way it has for so long (and may still tomorrow). But not today. The way Aizen's has, but will not—not today.

Hinamori is laughing. Kyouraku turns to Hitsugaya. Watches him watch her.

—

Here are the pieces.

—

_It won't take much. This universe was built on only a spark._

_Matsumoto is right. He can't handle the release of this much reiatsu in this state, and he can't control it. But what he feels instead of cells exploding, flesh rending, is the dragon heat of Hyourinmaru's body coiling past him. (The winds Hyourinmaru brings are cold, but his body—you can only tell when he is close enough to touch—is warm.)_

_Don't go, Hitsugaya thinks. Then he shouts, Take me with you._

_Not toward death (he's made promises), not entirely. Just a piece._

_Because here is what he and Hyourinmaru both know: We are all reishi, in the end. But the only thing that sows life is life. If you want to wake the weather, you need a spark. Tensou juurin is not about control; it is about becoming. It is the dragon in your dreams; it is the wings it lends you. It is the serpent body coiled at your feet, unspooling into the skies before you._

_(Give him your heart. Keep some back. Not all of it belongs to you.)_

_Don't go, Hitsugaya thinks, because whatever promises he's made and whatever certainties he feels, it all still feels like loss. He's not sure if he's calling after Hyourinmaru, or himself._

_It feels like his heart being torn from his chest. It feels like staring into the hollow in their courtyard, the ways the eyes of the corpses sunk in. It feels like the ache of the numbers tallying up, the lives he did not protect, the thick ink smell of name upon name upon name printed on their certificate of death._

_When Hitsugaya looks down, his chest is whole. He feels Hyourinmaru, a body only in his mind again. In the steel blade in his hand. He feels empty._

_He feels a warm breeze. He feels his knees buckle, and his arms go limp. He tastes green and dirt. (Don't drown—all the ice is melting. It's summer, after all.)_

_It's summer again._

_He hears a voice call his name._

—

Here is your heart.


End file.
